If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting! “If [the myth of Sisyphus] is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus,...

Over the course of my last few reviews I’ve been considering the role of the author as narrator and as character, and the degree to which authorial insertion is, to the mind of the reader, assumed to be inalienable. In large part this has been inspired by the narrator character–who is, perhaps, the author himself–in Milan Kundera’s The...

  Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all… The story that I am asked to tell most often is how I met my husband, a story that is notable for the coincidence that it involves. We met, of course, in two different venues in a single night. Without exception, people seem to see this story as something involving...

  [the spoiler-averse may wish to look away]  “We all this land of ours Great Britain…I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.” So muses Stevens, erstwhile butler to Lord Darlington, as he embarks...

  Eva Khatchadourian is ambivalent on the notion of children: she fears the curtailing of her life and career, and the mind-numbing spiral into a world of baby-talk and mushy foods. But yet, Eva has always wanted something more out of her life than what it has offered up to her from its platter of banality. The anguish she experienced at her tenth birthday...

  When my husband and I returned from our honeymoon in Argentina, I set to work transferring our various pamphlets, maps, tickets and so on into an album. Daunted by the mound of material in front of me, I decided to put the album together in the simplest manner I could: by location, and then by theme. My husband, however, wanted to know why I hadn’t...